The Toronto Star is following Clement Kent’s tulip in a project we are calling Mr. Kent’s Tulip. We have installed two garden-friendly cameras in Mr. Kent’s garden to chart his tulip’s progress, and the Star’s Jennifer Wells will write a daily tulip blog. Email your Toronto tulip photos to wildtoronto@gmail.com, with your location, and we’ll put it on our tulip map.

Am I blue? Let’s think.

I find blue hydrangeas quite unsettling. They remind me of poly powdery-coloured pantsuits of days gone by, pantsuits that seemed to sprout in spring.

The blue hydrangea appears to be an especially popular Easter-time purchase. I believe this should stop. Mr. Kent notes that the search for a blue rose continues. As I said to Mr. Kent the other day, “I feel quite strongly that there should not be a blue rose.” To which Mr. Kent replied: “I rather agree.”

The conversation made him curious about pigments in tulips. So of course he conducted an experiment. Lovely fellow, Mr. Kent. Here’s what he discovered.

“Why are tulips like red cabbages? It’s not just the purple prose about them, since fairly few other than Lewis Carroll’s Walrus actually wax poetic about cabbages. It’s that they both get part of their colour from pigments called anthocyanins. The scientific name means “flower blues,” and I would be crying the blues about the two liqueur glasses I knocked off the counter and broke just after taking this picture, except that the experiment worked!

Anthocyanins dissolve in water, a trick ancient monks used to prepare blue pigments from bachelor’s buttons flowers. I took some fading petals from a red tulip and put them in a ceramic bowl. I added a little water and crushed the petals for several minutes with a spoon - my kitchen equivalent of a monk’s mortar and pestle. When the water looked pink I poured the mix through a sieve (a paper coffee filter would be even better) and divided the fluid among the three glasses. I added a few drops of lime juice (acidic) to the glass on the left, and some baking soda (alkaline) to the glass on the right, leaving the middle one as my control. Can you see the colour differences? A few hours later, the baking soda glass (the only one I didn’t break!) was looking a deeper purple.”

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